The first meetup of 2017 covered the workflow of various developers.
- Chris O’Dell uses Microsoft’s Visual Studio with a PHP plugin and Team Foundation Server as a code repository. Chris doesn’t version control his WP core files, and is meticulous in keeping version notes and his check in routines.
- Jonathan Whiteland has rather an esoteric setup working between three different desktop machines, using BBedit for code editing and Git (GitHub) as an analogue of Dropbox – storing working files in Git and deploying to dev and then live as needed.
- Ben Attenborough uses DesktopServer as a local dev server with Bitbucket for Git storage. Ben also uses Gulp for running tasks like concatenation, SASS pre-processing and so on. Ben pushes changes through Git, rather than FTP. Ben also introduced us to Kint and Whoops, two excellent ways to make PHP var dumps and error messages more useful.
- Adam Maltpress shared some of the software he uses for work and sanity, including the NetBeans IDE. Adam uses either Git or SVN for version control, and tries to build sites as database agnostically as possible – they should work as well with test content as with real content!
- Simon Bragg uses Xampp, the Duplicator WordPress plugin, and FileZilla as well as the NetBeans IDE (using its built-in SASS pre-processing). This prompted a big discussion around the PHPStorm IDE.
- Steven Watts then took us through his infographic on setting up a WordPress site and some of the key plugins he uses.